Is that mud or chocolate on my shirt?

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Tag Spartan Beast

I kind of feel that I really only need to write that one line. It’s over. I did it. Jay and I crossed the finish line 5 hours faster than my previous completed Beast and nearly 2 hours faster than my goal time. It was 7 hours and 18 minutes of torture, but not nearly as torturous as the Beast at Killington.

I’ll, of course, post more than that because it would be a shitty recap if I didn’t. This will be mostly pics (lots of pics) and some comments.

First things first, though. Bag check sucked donkey-butt. You are now expected to shove your bag check stuff into a little white plastic bag and that bag is what gets checked. No more shoving both my and Jay’s stuff into one duffle bag. $5 a pop = $10. Goodie. But whatever. We were there. We were checked. We started.

Here’s why this post is entitled “Spartan Yeti.” There was snow. Lots and lots of snow.

Jay tried to take pics of as many obstacles as possible, so here’s one of the first.

Lots of singletrack trail/climby stuff…

…that kept going and going and going.

This is one of my favorite things to do. When I first started with this stuff, the vertical cargo climb scared the tuna salad out of me. Now it ain’t no thing.

The log hop was changed a little to incorporate a short balance beam and the logs were way closer together and uniform than in the past. It felt super-easy to me, but I saw a LOT of people burpeeing this one.

There were logs tagged up with ‘SPARTAN BEAST’ all over the course- just in case you forgot what you were doing out there.

Remember how I said there was lots of snow? Well, snow melts into bloody fucking cold water. This was bloody fucking cold water.

Burpees happened here. This obstacle had a horizontal bar to hold onto and swing across to hanging ropes that you had to swing across monkey-bar style.

Herculean hoist. Either I got a lot stronger, or they seriously lowered the weight since 2013. Me and another girl next to me actually fell to the ground because we yanked as though it would be heavy and it wasn’t.

Burpees again at the spear toss. Though I did come closer than I ever had before.

Monkey bars= Burpees

The Traverse Wall reboot. They added 2 turns into the wall. I actually made it around a turn. Hot damn! And then I fell and smashed my ankle bone. It’s still bruised.

This was the Bucket Brigade. The ladies had to fill their buckets about 2/3, guys 3/4 of the way full with rocks. Do you see how friggin’ long this was?

This dealie was a weighted sled on a little embankment. You had to pull it down via a rope and then drag it back up again by the chain. Easy, right? But see that snow? It made the sled get stuck and made the chain REALLY cold.

I call this “The Yeti’s Bunghole.” It was not an obstacle, but a gigantic hole in the glacier that was one of the slopes. This could have made someone’s race really sucktacular.

Sandbag carry. Not as long, but there were spots of thick and/or deep mud to trip you up.

I hate this inverted wall thing.

The Tyrolean traverse (shimmy horizontally on a rope) was not over water this time. Somehow, this comforted me enough try it for the first time. I got about 1/3 of the way before my arms gave out, so I call it an accomplishment.

Standard cargo net climb

Log flips instead of tire flips. Many apologies to the girl next to me who kept getting mud splashed up at her face by my falling log.

Rope climb. Another set of burpees.

Under the wall into the cold, cold water.

I wore my Altra Lone Peaks for this race. They did not do well on the slippery wall here. Sadness.

What’s this now? Another barbed wire crawl? OK, I’ve seen 3 in a Beast so no biggie. But OH SHIZ! IT’S IN THE SNOW!! Oh how I wished for a pair of gloves magically appear on my hands.

Then there were these tubes you had to walk through. Kinda dumb, but broke up the monotony of climb up slope, climb up steeper slope, climb up really steep slope.

Then, even though the finish line was right next to that slippery wall, we had to ascend roughly 500 feet back up the mountain in about half a mile. It was brutal.

Once we were down the slope again, there was this Tarzan swing (that I wussed out on.)

Then fire jump and finish line to get a spiffy new medal and a finisher shirt that actually says Beast on it. (Sorry, no pic. It’s in the wash.)

All in all, the race course itself was pretty great. The thing that I didn’t like was how overpriced EVERYTHING was. Registration is high enough, but then the $5 for bag check, $10 parking, overpriced food ($9 for a hotdog!), and let’s not discuss how much they charge a spectator.

They also failed to mention that there were 3 different parking lots when we got on the shuttle to Mountain Creek. Going back, we were asked if we were in lot A, B, or C. We didn’t know. We described the lot and the guy said it was A. When we got to A, we realized we were supposed to be in B. Luckily, the shuttle driver just took us to lot B on his way back, unlike at a certain other event.

I’m happy that this is over with. I’m going to get my Trifecta again this year, but then I think I’m done with sufferfests. “This will not be over quickly. You will not enjoy this” is a great line for a movie, but not my weekend.